December 29, 2011
The Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory, which will neither be recovering gravity or being inside the moon but "GRAIL" apparently sounds good, is coming into Lunar Orbit as I write this.
As you know from watching Apollo 13 the travel distance to or back from the moon is a matter of several…
December 27, 2011
Wow.
Wow again. Good show, octopus!
December 26, 2011
You may have noticed very little activity on this blog (and other Scienceblogs) over the last few days. We had a technical difficulty somewhere around the Christmas. What happened was our main communication antenna was sheered off by an unidentified flying object. After the reindeer and elf parts…
December 26, 2011
The presumption being examined here is that humans are divisible into different groups (races would be one term for those groups) that are genetically distinct from one another in a way that causes those groups to have group level differences in average intelligence, as measured by IQ. More exactly…
December 24, 2011
Me too. But in the old days, they made them to last, even if they were stuck in your stomach for 25 years!
December 24, 2011
This is a rewrite and amalgamation, into one post, of a series of earlier posts written for non-geeks just starting out with Linux. The idea is to provide the gist, a few important facts, and some fun suggestions, slowly and easily.
At some level all operating systems are the same, but in some…
December 23, 2011
SpaceX CEO & CTO Elon Musk discusses the difficulty of making a reusable rocket. Filmed at The National Press Club.
December 22, 2011
A strange 1.1 meter circumfrence hollow metallic ball appears to have fallen from space, or somewhere, onto Namibia. The pertinent facts:
The hollow ball with a circumference of 1.1 metres (43 inches) was found near a village in the north of the country some 750 kilometres (480 miles) from the…
December 22, 2011
The farther away you look, the farther back in time you see. So, GN-108036, a galaxy spotted by NASA's Spitzer and Hubble scopes, is 12.9 billion light-years away, and thus, about 12.9 billion years ago (not counting adjustments for cosmic expansion). It turns out that GN-108036 is producing stars…
December 22, 2011
Below the fold because the video is too wide:
From here.
December 22, 2011
I'm thinking there's another explanation. But it does point out something people need to know about penguins ... wherever they hang out, it tends to smell bad.
December 22, 2011
Photographer Scott Rowed has penned an excellent essay on his experience making the switch to Linux, and he's agreed to place it here as a guest post. Please read it and pass it on to people, school districts, small island nations, and others who may benefit. This is a repost from about two years…
December 21, 2011
This image, one of the first obtained by NASA's Dawn spacecraft in its low altitude mapping orbit, shows an area within the Rheasilvia basin in the south polar area of the giant asteroid Vesta. Image credit: NASA/ JPL-Caltech/ UCLA/ MPS/ DLR/ IDA
NASA's Dawn spacecraft has sent back the first…
December 21, 2011
March is the snowiest month. We get lots of snow in December. Sometimes it is too cold to snow. When I was a kid (whenever that was) there were more snow storms, the total snow cover was much, much deeper, and when it snowed...it snowed, by golly!
Such are a few of the things people say about the…
December 21, 2011
The eternal question ... answered. [a repost]
dogs:
cats:
December 20, 2011
The famous bird, birding and birder blog, 10,000 birds, has reached the 4,000 post mark. So, if there are 10,000 birds and 4,000 posts .....
But seriously, it's true, it did!
Did you know that I blog there once a month? No? Then you have some catching up to do! I appear to have done nine of…
December 20, 2011
First, there were big-giant planets discovered orbiting other stars. Then, more recently, a planet in the star's Goldilocks Zone ... where water would be at least sometimes liquid, were it present. But that was a big planet that may or may not have been truly "class M" in having a surface,…
December 20, 2011
Or even not at home!
(I'm talking about the part with the dummy that is not a dummy.)
December 19, 2011
I just saw something on TV about people running around with "Made in America" tee-shirts trying to talk everyone else into buying Christmas presents that were made in America, and naturally, my cynical self wondered which East or Southeast Asian Sweat Shops the tee-shirts were made in.
So I looked…
December 19, 2011
As you know, I've shifted some of the topics I have discussed on this blog over to The X Blog. However, some topics can very reasonably go on both. One of these is how we communicate, and argue, and sometimes make progress in this crazy, zany place we call The Blogsophere. Also, as an…
December 19, 2011
Remember that! Why? This is why!
Brilliant. Now you have pictures and pithy sayings to remember all these important science facts.
December 19, 2011
It has come to my attention that there are people in the US who think Reindeer are fictional animals. That make sense because they are associated in may people's minds [SPOILER ALERT] with a fictional character known as ....
...Santa Claus. Others may know that Caribou exist but think that…
December 19, 2011
YA Animated News Story:
Related: Ode to Rocky and Attack of the Hound of Malembi. Or, "Whose are these people, anyway?"
December 18, 2011
... As reported in the Washington Post. Kim Jong Il took power in 1994 on the death of his father, Kim Il Sung. Now, Kim Jong Il's son, Kim Jong Un will become dictator of North Korea.
December 17, 2011
It is done. The very last US Troops1 left Iraq a few moments ago, according to reports. And when I say "wheels up" I speak metaphorically, because I think they may have driven over into Kuwait.
____________
1Except the ones that I assume are still there somewhere.
December 17, 2011
Sheril Kirshenbaum has a few comments about a piece in Science addressing innate differences between boys and girls in math. I have to say, it may be hard to accept the scientific truth sometimes, but the research really does consistently say the same thing again and again. In this latest study,…
December 17, 2011
Sunday Morning: "The Knowledge of Good and Evil"
Listen to Glenn Kleier on Atheists Talk #146, Sunday, December 18, 2011.
Glenn Kleier will join Atheists Talk this Sunday to discuss his rousing new suspense thriller, The Knowledge of Good and Evil. Kleier has a background in advertising, marketing…
